Twitter Spam Campaign Infects Users With Fake Antivirus Programs

A large spam campaign observed on Twitter during the last couple of days directed users to malicious websites that exploited vulnerabilities in browser plug-ins to infect their computers with rogue antivirus programs, according to security researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab.

While monitoring the spam campaign for several hours, Kaspersky's researchers counted 4,148 tweets containing malicious links being sent from 540 compromised Twitter accounts.

"Our analysis is just a snapshot at a given time, and is lower than reality," said Kaspersky Lab senior malware researcher Nicolas Brulez in a blog post on Wednesday.

The rogue tweets contained messages such as "online virus check," "proven anti-virus," "excellent anti-virus," as well as links to websites with .TK and .TW1.SU domain names.

The high variation of links, messages and hijacked accounts used in this spam campaign could explain why Twitter's automated spam filters weren't successful at blocking it.

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News 1 year ago